Run by and for the people (after a brief period of proletarian dictatorship), the economy would produce, not what was profitable, but what the people needed. Abundance would reign. Inequalities and coercive government would disappear. All this, Marx and Engels expected, would happen in the most highly industrialized nations of Western Europe, the only part of the world where conditions were ripe for these developments. These prophecies have not come true. Capitalism, though sometimes threatened, has not collapsed; shortages, inequalities, and coercive government have persisted in countries that called themselves Communist; and followers of Marx have come to power in nations that lacked the preconditions he and Engels considered essential. The first of these countries was Russia, a huge, poor, relatively backward nation that was just beginning to acquire an industrial base. Its people, still largely illiterate, had no experience in political participation. In 1917, after a series of halfhearted reform measures and disastrous mismanagement of the war effort, the antiquated mechanism of czarist rule simply disintegrated and was swept away. It was succeeded, after a lengthy period of political upheaval, by the Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxism "later known as the Communist Party "led by Lenin (Foreman 123). .
From its inception, Communist rule in the Soviet Union faced a variety of problems. In the early years the government's very existence was challenged repeatedly by its enemies within the country. When the Communist Party emerged victorious, it was faced with the need to rebuild the nation's ruined economy and to train the Russian people for life in the 20th century. Later, all efforts were concentrated on the task of transforming a backward country into a leading industrial nation and a first-rate military power (Pious 154).
The task was ambitious, the obstacles were formidable, and there was no time to waste "particularly after the disastrous interruption of World War II.
